Dr. Kalpana Sahni
Not long ago a friend of mine in Lahore asked for a catchy title for an exhibition to be held in London. She was not impressed by my suggestions so I asked an Indian professor in Mexico to help. By the evening he had sent half a dozen options. All this activity between Pakistan, India and Mexico was over e-mail.
There is another incident I recall. I was reading a wonderful, but rather depressing contemporary Russian novel and was getting frustrated by the unfamiliar slang. Then I hit upon the idea of emailing the slang to a friend in Moscow who sent me a continuous feedback. Now imagine the Internet’s use in quite another setting. The girl is on the computer and a woman arrives at her desk with a live chicken and explains how her chickens have all suddenly developed a walking problem and points to the crooked legs. With difficulty, the girl and the woman get the restless chicken to stand still. A photo is taken of its legs and transmitted to a computer at another destination. The response comes in a couple of hours. The chickens have vitamin B deficiency and a remedy is provided.Later in the day, the girl looks up the e-astrology charts for some enthusiastic women or writes complaints to various government departments, or requests a birth certificate for a child that is entering school. This remarkable girl’s name is Rosy of village Padinettamkudi, 35 kilometres from the nearest town in Tamil Nadu.
Rosy uses her computer to also make railway bookings for a man; set up the web cam and recorder for a woman’s appointed time to talk to her son in the Gulf; she then contacts a city hospital to set up an appointment for a cataract operation. Come evening, Rosy is conducting adult literacy classes for the villagers, and at weekends — English language classes for children. Folks, I can go on and on … I am thrilled to bits about the silent revolution that is spreading across rural India. Rosy is just one of the many trained computer operators who earn some Rs4000 per month. The computer has arrived in deep rural India.An enterprising team of scientists and alumni from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras initiated a programme, which would provide Internet access to rural India. Known as n-Logue this rural Internet Service provider launched its programme some years ago in Tamil Nadu. Today it covers most of South India, Gujarat, Rajasthan and Jharkand with the aim of providing Internet access to every Indian village. That means targeting over 700 million people. A bank loan of Rs50, 000 to purchase the computer and its accessories, including a printer, a web camera, a four-hour battery backup and software was given to each kiosk operator. Villagers were trained to become kiosk operators and a software programme was developed. Some hospitals and doctors helped by providing basic training and questionnaires for the operators and they simultaneously conducted regular weekly videoconferencing with patients.Now farmers are interacting with agricultural research institutes and veterinary institutes to find quick solutions to pests and animal ailments. For instance, a Tamilian farmer photographed a diseased bhindi on the web cam. This was emailed to the Madurai Rural Agriculture Centre, which e-mailed back the remedy.
More and more farmers, by turning to www for market information, thus avoiding middlemen, are selling their food crops directly at auction centres, which offer better returns. The chanderi weavers, once impoverished by middlemen, got organised into a weavers’ guild. Today they sell directly to their customers through the net and to shops like Fabindia. The guild now makes profits in millions of rupees. Bellandur village near Bangalore has become India’s first e-governed village panchayat administration, covering five villages and some 10,000 people. Government data like tax collection, birth and death certificates, details of property are now available on the net. Consequently the registration of land has become simple. Bureaucratic delays, bribery and corruption have been minimized. According to Mr Jagannath, the elected president of the village and the initiator of e-governance, “Revenue loopholes have been plugged. All government records are available at the click of a button”. And then there is the immense opportunity opening up in education. n-Logue diversified into games, music, painting and fiction for children and children’s publishing houses like Tulika have made books available in multiple languages for the village networks. On Sundays these hubs turn into libraries and activity centres for children.
Interestingly, the majority of kiosk operators are girls or women. Drishtee is spreading e-governance, health and education in rural areas through the net. In September the Government of India announced its plan of setting up 100,000 rural kiosks to serve 600,000 villages. In short, the possibilities that are opening up to villagers through the net are bringing about an exciting change which promises to turn them from areas of outward migration to places of well being and prosperity.
Has any one read Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide. Washington based Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times – is known for being “a girlie girl, being shy, but most of all for being, at age 53, still single (is being single the cause of her bitterness about men, one may wonder). With her sexy good looks and nonstop ability to weave words on themselves, she is said to be shy everywhere but on the page. In discussing the roles women and men play in relating to one another, writer who is famous for being intent on keeping her private life out of the public eye yields details about her own life that have usually been left out of consideration in her writings. Maureen Dowd’s title is very descriptive if one was to judge a book by its cover. Title features a candy for male eyes. It shows bombshell in a clingy red dress strap-hanging under the leering gaze of her fellow subway riders, all male. Below such an image, the subtitle, “When Sexes Collide,” seems suggesting an unending tug of war between both sexes from “dating, to flirting, to hanging out, to hooking up, to marriage and her belief that men don’t like to wed successful women.”